Permanently Deleted
I keep thinking back to this “very very liberal” person I met earlier this year. Surgeon’s daughter, studied poetry, about as disconnected from anything as you’d expect. We got on the topic of art criticism at one point. I went into how I’m not approaching it from an academic standpoint so much as a critical theory and modernist one. Contextualising art to understand what created the thoughts of the artist, the material availability of their supplies, and how the systems they lived under shaped creativity as an institution/beauty as an ideal. The social and material conditions surrounding the work. She responded with something that I still don’t understand and still haven’t gotten over. “Oh no, I try to remove all of those things so it’s just the work”.
Literally any level of analysis beyond “i like this book it was very good the good man was good and killeded the bad mans” takes those things into account. It has to if you want to understand the most basic questions like “why does Van Gogh paint like a Japanese person?” or “why’d someone paint all these horses and dead guys?” or “what do these words in a TS Eliot poem mean beyond their cadence?”. She has a master’s degree in this. Intelligent person. It was such a pure :zizek-ok: ideology moment that it further radicalised me on humanities education. It should be provided for free to the working class and slapped out of the mouths of the bourgeoisie.
This sort of attitude toward art is really common, and I’ve thought about a few different things that might be contributing to it.
For one, in the US at least, basically all of our education in literature prior to college is geared around standardized tests, and these tests need to have straightforward, objective answers (generally multiple choice!). So the questions end up being like, what is the author’s purpose in writing X, or what is the attitude the author has toward issue Y, or what is the contradiction been the author’s points in paragraphs G and H, etc.
I think if this is how you’re taught to think about all literature, it’s not surprising that so many people think about art as a kind of puzzle to decode with a single, objective, correct answer, and that bringing in cultural or political context is somehow cheating.
It was a direct confrontation with the things that make that world so bad. That ontological split between liberal/Marxist in non-political contexts is always interesting, but my god to get to that level of studying one form of art and still do that. Both the structure and the product are rotten.
They took everything good we did and claims it as theirs. Can’t have shit in ideology.
During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the ‘consolation’ of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.
I was talking with someone the other day and they just kept saying, “sure there are great ideas, but how do we expect to pay for it?”
Campaigning for Bernie was very instructive. You’d get Warren libs goin like, “but you see what you bros fail to consider is how you gonna pay for it lol?” Then you explain how they ran the numbers and proved that there would be net savings for individuals’ healthcare costs and just… Blank stares… :agony-mescaline: :doomjak:
there must be a reason behind the post.
